#7 HOT IN THE TROPICS




Monday, July 02, 2001
19:28  Ship Time
30' N
45" W

We're all hot.  
We're all hot, but no one mentions it.
It's not because of some endurance ethic, or embarrassment of being the one that wimps out or any macho strain.  We don't mention it for the same reason that sailors don't whistle onboard. Sailors just don't talk about the weather much because of superstition of what it will bring.  Kind of like knocking on wood but there being no wood on this hunk of floating steel, better to not say anything in the first place.  As much as some of these folks are suffering in the blazing sun, hardly a breath of breeze, the sickeningly sweet stench of diesel fumes wafting around us, no one would want the heavy weather that all these folks have experienced. That is, all these folks except one, me.  I've looked at the web sites, with the cool shots of the huge seas swamping the aft of the ship.  I've been reading the "Heavy Weather" books in the library. I've been studying the Beaufort Scale (1-12 rating of wind speed and sea conditions).   


Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale.
Luckily, we never saw this! (or anything close)
And you don't find me complaining about the current weather. You don't find me whistling on board either.  Funny how a boat full of rational scientists fall back on these superstitious routines when it comes right down to it. 




We've arrived at Dusty 1, our first major station. It sits almost atop the Mid-Atlantic rift, the zone of origin of the two Atlantic plates, one generating crust enlarging the US side of the Atlantic, one the European side.  We are here to retrieve a sampling device moored here last year by the same group. This device has been collecting all the sediment fall out from the ocean surface every month for the past year.  Here is a cool video all about sediment traps. 


We'll analyze the content and determine the nutrient input from Sahara dust storms and the productivity of this area based on the organic material that falls from the surface.  








Upon arrival, we launched a floating sediment trap that involved a 100lb weight, a long line, the sediment trap, 9 open topped tubes filled with a formaldehyde solution, another long line, another sampling device that captures deep water samples for trace mineral analysis, then floats, and a buoyed mast with radar reflector, radio transmitter and light strobe.  The whole string of gear stretches about  200 yards deep.
The gear is very cool.  Tonight under a bright moon, we took a suitcase out to the back of the fantail, plugged an underwater radio speaker into it and lowered the speaker into the deep.  Turned on the equipment and sent a "ping" (a coded radio transmission) to wake up the harness device holding the moored sediment trap to the bottom.  The radio signal went down 4200 meters, over 4 kilometers, 2.6 miles deep, to a device that has been sleeping for 14 months.  Everyone was wondering if it was still there, if it would work...   Ping, it responded, waking up.  Tomorrow, we send the signal to release and it will let go of the device, which will float to the top with all its buoys.

Reporting from the Mid-Atlantic rift,

David

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